What resistance will the IDF face, what price will have to be paid to win, and will the world let Israel finish the job?
Unlike previous rounds of Israel-Hamas fighting, Israel’s war aims seem clear. “We’ll destroy the entity called Hamas,” said Defense Minister Yoav Gallant last week. Similar utterances from everyone from Netanyahu to the IDF brass demonstrate both a rare cohesion and determination. But beyond the tough words, there’s a great lack of clarity about what Hamas’s destruction actually means. Destroying the organization as a fighting force in a meaningful sense means not only killing its thousands of fighters and removing military materiel — it means ensuring the enclave’s pacification. That, in turn, requires a plan for the day after. Biden has warned Israel that reoccupation of Gaza would be a “big mistake,” but who will step in to ensure that Hamas doesn’t reconstitute when Israeli troops pull out? Shocked by the wanton slaughter, Israel is united in the conviction that Hamas has to go; whether that is a sufficiently clear war aim remains to be seen.
While Israel has been accused of war crimes for calling for a million residents to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip, the logic is to free the IDF to pound every suspected Hamas hideout ahead of a ground attack. But even after that softening-up, the army is expected to face formidable defenses in that most difficult of theaters: urban warfare. Hamas has built an enormous warren of tunnels — what the IDF dubs the “Gaza metro” — that contain everything from men to weaponry. Every building in northern Gaza could be booby-trapped, or contain the exit to an attack tunnel. Hamas will aim to maximize Gaza’s civilian deaths, to capitalize on Israel’s sensitivity to world opinion. The terror organization will also play its hostage card: with 200 Israelis and foreign workers known to have fallen into the killers’ hands, the Israeli public can expect to face horrific, ISIS-worthy scenes of captives held by their Hamas torturers.
The air force will also have to operate carefully, with Hamas known to be equipped with large numbers of anti-aircraft missiles. The air force has other worries, though: After years of roaming freely across the Middle East, it’s not clear that their home bases are safe from the terrorists. Local residents around the Tel Nof base near Rehovot note that for hours after the Hamas offensive, jets didn’t take off in the way that they always do whenever Hamas attacks — possibly due to the massive rocket bombardment aimed at the base. Uzi Rubin, a former general and head of Israel’s missile development organization, warned in these pages a few years ago of precisely this scenario, and advocated developing a massive rocket force that could survive the neutralization of the air force. He was ignored, and here we are.
The wall-to-wall support for action in Gaza — literally unthinkable two weeks ago — is a product of the horrific nature of the attack, which has utterly shaken the Israeli psyche. For the first time, Israel’s left is thirsting for Hamas blood every bit as much as the right. But it’s Western leaders who could potentially act as a drag on the IDF completing its work. So far, center-left leaders such as President Biden and Britain’s opposition leader, Labour Party head Keir Starmer, have stood firmly behind Israel’s right to self-defense. But as Gaza’s civilian losses inevitably pile up, how long will they be able to withstand pressure from their parties’ left flanks? And if Western support drops, is Israel ready to become a pariah in order to destroy Hamas once and for all?
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